This is one of several issues that have been brought up on an almost
periodic basis for the past several years. There have been several
attempts by various folks, including a rather ambitious one by this author,
and all have died because of severe lack of interest. It has been a few
years since I have posted to this news group but my advise to you is to
give it up. You will only meet with much frustration, apathy, and
something along the lines of " if you don't like it fix it yourself".

I consider this very unfortunate, because has some commercial properties
that could well be more attractive than other OS'S. The development team
just is not interested in this issue. I have fought many a battle in years
past over marketing issues with members of the core team and others. OK,
everyone lets see you flame throwers..... Wes Petters, Jordan Hubbard, are
you out there....;-)

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Frank
At 06:57 PM 12/27/2004, Roger 'Rocky' Vetterberg wrote:

Simon Burke wrote:
[snip]

2. If it wasn't for the interesting content and structure of the FreeBSD
website, it would be among the less beautiful. Yes, it serves its
purpose well by being simple and straight to the point. But a redesign
could offer just the same -- simplicity and accuracy -- without being
ugly.

Aesthetics are not everything, the web site does what its supposed to
do. Also i actually like how it looks.
A lot of people have strong feelings about all these all singing all
dancing webistes. There is just no need. Keep it simple and easy to
navigate around thats all thats really important. If the aesthetics
really matter more than function to such people who use BSD then they
would probably be not using BSD but either windows or linux, where you
have a nice pretty GUI to look at all the nice pretty sites.

This is where I think a lot of people simply does not understand the problem.

Im a FreeBSD user. I like FreeBSD because it does not have all the flashy
installers and pretty GUI's that many linux distros seems to have today.
But still, Ive been screaming for years for someone to improve the
website. Why?
Anyone that has stood in front of a boardroom full of CEO's or similar and
tried to promote the use of FreeBSD in a big organisation knows why. They
might like all the facts about the os, the rock-solid stability, the
lightning-fast performance and its solid reputation as a server os, but
one look at the website and they will run screaming towards the nearest
linux advocate instead.
We, the users, might not care about our image, but if we want to be taken
seriously by the rest of the world we better do something about it!

[snip]

4. There should be some kind of FreeBSD business card and letterhead
available to all that support this project.

I have to ask why? why would people need such things? that i just dont
understand